Snow White and the depressing culture war over Disney’s ‘woke’ remake (2024)

Disney’s live action take on the classic 1937 animation Snow White won’t be hitting multiplexes until at least 2025 thanks to the recent writers’ strike, so you might wonder why the studio has chosen this week to publish a first still of the famous princess surrounded by her seven faithful homunculi. It could be because the House of Mouse simply wants us to know that this thing is still on, despite all the weirdness surrounding it. And let’s make no mistake, the furore around this movie really has been downright weird from the beginning.

Somehow, Snow White has managed to get on the wrong side of “anti-woke” crusaders on both sides of the Atlantic, people with dwarfism who think (quite reasonably) that these kind of role should be played by actors with dwarfism, AND Peter Dinklage, the Game of Thrones star who described the project last year as “that f*cking backwards story about seven dwarves living in a cave together” and bemoaned the fact that his own stupendous screen efforts hadn’t consigned such trite and patronising tales to the dustbin of history.

Basically, pretty much everyone who has so far spoken up in the media seems to hate the idea of Snow White, because pretty much everyone has a different idea of how the story should, or should not be retold. The movie’s star Rachel Zegler told Disney’s D23 meet last year that the studio was reimagining the tale through a 21st-century prism. “She’s not going to be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love,” she said. “She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true.” In separate interviews, Zegler said the original 1937 film was “extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for” and described the classic movie as a “love story with a guy who literally stalks her”.

Fairly innocuous comments, you might think, about an 86-year-old movie that probably needs an update for modern times. But these comments drew a blizzard of outrage from Twitter accounts called things like “End Wokeness”, Britain’s Daily Mail and the US conservative channel Daily Wire (which has actually gone to the incredible lengths of making its own anti-woke rival movie – yes, this really exists!)

Much of the anger aimed at Snow White has been fostered by paparazzi pictures, purportedly from the Bedfordshire shoot of the film, which appeared to show that the dwarves have been replaced by a racially and gender-diverse cast of mostly able-bodied, average height actors – the Daily Mail labelled them “magical creatures” – with the exception of one person with dwarfism.

Is it real? Is it fake? At this point, few would be surprised to discover that the whole thing was the invention of mischievous AI tasked with finding the very image that would most infuriate social conservatives. Disney has pointed out that the shots are not “official” photos, which hardly seems surprising given they more closely resemble a 1980s village hall performance of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men than a major Hollywood production.

Disney’s response has been to find a solution that may end up pleasing nobody, but is so confusing and bland that it might just avoid stoking the fires of controversy any further. In the still, Zegler is surrounded by seven completely CGI dwarves, who are all reportedly played by the actor Martin Klebba (though other sources suggest the latter will be restricted to the role of Grumpy). Clearly the studio has bought itself time to solve this conundrum, with the aim of releasing a final product that doesn’t end up annoying anybody – at least to the extent that it hits the film’s box office.

The entire farrago does pose the question, however, of just what the point is of this new Snow White. It isn’t going to be the romantic, traditionalist fantasy of sexless heterosexual love that conservatives are apparently hankering after. There doesn’t seem to be enough going on here for the remake to be cleverly reimagined as a spiky, satirical feminist remake, a la Barbie. Zegler is going to be doing an awful lot of green screen. So where does that leave us?

The worry is that the answer is somewhere bland and prosaic, another 21st-century, tech-assisted rework of a classic that has stood the test of time only because it is so much of its time. At least Disney now has the best part of two more years to prove us wrong.